The Raven Cycle Quotes

“The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“I know when I'm awake and when I'm asleep," Ronan Lynch said.
Adam Parrish, curled over himself in a pair of battered, greasy coveralls, asked, "Do you?"
"Maybe I dreamt you," he said.
"Thanks for the straight teeth, then," Adam replied.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.

Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“I guess now would be a good time to tell you," He said. "I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“I don't care to be pretty," Blue shot back hotly, "I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.
One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment , but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Where the hell is Ronan?" Gansey asked, echoing the words that thousands of humans had uttered since mankind developed speech.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“Noah crouched over Gansey's body. He said, for the last time, 'You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.'
Gansey died.
'Goodbye,' Noah said. 'Don't throw it away.'
He quietly slid from time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“Did you get notes for me?"
"No", Ronan replied,"I thought you were dead in a ditch.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey's greatness.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Depending on where you began the story, it was about Noah Czerny.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“He was so much more dangerous when he wasn't angry.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“But what [Gansey] said was, "I'm going to need everyone to be straight with each other from now on. No more games. This isn't just for Blue, either. All of us."
Ronan said, "I'm always straight."
Adam replied, "Oh, man, that's the biggest lie you've ever told."
Blue said, "Okay.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“It'll be OK. I'm ready. Blue, kiss me.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“I know you are not the same as him, Adam said. But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“She drifted towards the bedroom, on her way to have a bath or take a nap or start a war.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Ronan did not smoke; he preferred his habits with hangovers.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“It was true that Blue was just shy of five feet and it was also true that she hadn't eaten her greens, but she'd done the research and she didn't think the two were related.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“You look like a super villain with your familiar," Adam said.
Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“If Glendower had not saved Gansey's life, he did not know who to thank, or who to be, or how to live.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“It shouldn't have happened at all, but their friendship had been cemented in only the time it took to get to school that morning - Adam demonstrating how to fasten the Camaro's ground wire more securely, Gansey lifting Adam's bike halfway into the trunk so they could ride to school together, Adam confessing he worked at a mechanic's to put himself through Aglionby, and Gansey turning to the passenger seat and asking, "What do you know about Welsh kings?”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Adam translated, "Not death, but his brother, sleep.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Love had changed the situation. Niall didn't yet love the strange, dangerous child, but he loved Declan, and Declan loved Ronan. So Ronan lived.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“Gansey sighed, small and quiet and ragged, like he hadn't meant to let it escape. She shifted her gaze from the window to the side of his head, watching him watch instead. He pressed his thumb against his lower lip-this was Gansey, that gesture- and then he swallowed. It was, she thought, just as she felt when she looked at the stars, when she walked in Cabeswater.”
― Maggie Stiefvater

“They set off on the perfectly straight ley line, Ronan's gaze still directed up to his plane and to Chainsaw, a white bird and a black bird against the azure ceiling of the world.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“She called Gansey.
"Blue?" he said.
Just his voice. Her heart tethered itself. Not completely, but enough to stop quivering so much. She closed her eyes”
― Maggie Stiefvater

“Adam Parrish.

This was how it had begun: Ronan Lynch had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III's bright orange '73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn't hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning. Ronan, sure that he wouldn't find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.

This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldnt manage in a single year's use--secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan's attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.

"Who's that?" Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn't answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam's expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.

Ronan hadn't known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he'd known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:

Please.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Call Down the Hawk

“Ronan didn't care to think about this. It gave him the same vibe he used to get back at the Barns some nights, when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three died and were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he'd fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Mister Impossible

“What am I supposed to do with them?"
"Hell if I know. I just thought of you. Regift them. White rabbit shit."
"Elephant," murmured Gansey.
"Don't bring politics into this, Dick," Kavinsky replied.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves